Today Camera Corner had reps from Canon come to their store. They were supposed to have Nikon come there but he was sick and I only got to use the lenses that they had in stock. I got to experiment with this lens and this lens. The 14-24 is an INSANE lens, the angle of view of the lens is 114° at 14mm. To give you an idea of how wide that is, imagine you have a cabinet about 4′ high and you are only about a foot away and you take a picture. You can get the ground and part of the ceiling in your photo.
One thing I was blown away with was the speed of which the PROFESSIONAL lenses focus. My 80-200 is a pro lens but it is an older design, I thought it focused fast but the new AF-S or SWM driven lenses put mine to shame.
Since the Nikon dude wasn’t there I tried some Canon equipment. I am looking to buy this lens hopefully in a year, but I was forced to try the Canon equivalent. There is really no difference between the Canon and Nikon when it comes to the Professional lenses except for the name and PRICE. The autofocus of this lens was damn near instantaneous, I was experimenting with the Canon 7d, 5d mkII and 1d mkIII and the focus speed was very similar between the cameras. The 1d was the fastest to focus and in frames per second, 10 (insane), but it is the pro sports camera from Canon.
The lens is hand holdable for only a short period of time then the weight gets to you. After about 10 minutes of shooting with it I could feel the burn in the shoulders and arms from holding up the 8 pounds of camera equipment. One thing I found interesting is that when the Image Stabilization, IS, was working you could feel the lens vibrate from the optics spinning around inside the lens. The size of the lens also was surprising, I was expecting a big lens but not a lens with a 5″ front element on it and 6 pounds in weight.